The crypto industry has spent years building infrastructure for financial products and putting novel creations on top of those rails. Now comes the harder part: getting people to actually use these products.
That question is becoming more pressing across the industry as crypto moves closer to mainstream finance. Asset managers have tokenized funds, exchanges are expanding into lending, payments and other financial services and blockchain networks are courting institutions. The challenge is no longer just proving these products can be built, but figuring out what will make consumers and institutions choose to use them.
For companies like Coinbase (COIN), that has meant thinking less about the technology itself and more about what customers are trying to do with their money.
“The crypto industry oftentimes in the past was very technology oriented,” said Ben Shen, Coinbase’s head of financial services and loyalty products. Products could be heavy on jargon or expose users to the technology running underneath them.
That matters less as crypto starts to overlap with more traditional financial services, he said. Customers want to grow their money, hold it, send it, spend it or borrow against it. Whether a blockchain sits underneath the product isn’t necessarily the point.
